NADAAA, the architecture firm that won an international competition to redesign the Daniels Faculty's new building at One Spadina Crescent, has been named the Top American firm in Design by Architect, the magazine of the American Institute of Architects.

Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson, of Architect magazine writes:

Flip through NADAAA’s 2012 portfolio and you see a practice skilled in designing for all scales. For instance, a 600-square-foot retail space in San Francisco for skin care brand Aesop, in which a seemingly simple wall of randomly stacked recycled boxes utterly transforms a narrow, deep space into a dynamic interior. Or two new schools of architecture in Canada and Australia, both of which challenge the traditional assumptions of academic buildings with creative uses of material and assembly.

The building project at One Spadina Crescent will renew the south-facing 19th century Gothic Revival building and build out the unrealized northern face of the circle with a stunning work of contemporary architecture. Designed by architect Nader Terhani and his collaborator Katie Faulkner of the internationally renowned firm NADAAA, One Spadina will include dynamic, flexible learning and research environments for faculty and students, and will nurture the next generation of leaders in the field.

Below is a presentation of the design for One Spadina given on June 11, 2013 by NADAAA Architects Nader Terhani and Katie Faulkner.

Models and renderings of the designs for One Spadina are now on display at the Eric Arthur Gallery as part of the exhibition ONE FUTURE: The Daniels Faculty @ One Spadina.

Yonge Street — an online weekly magazine that focuses on innovation, development, neighbourhoods, and community involvement in Toronto — has published an article on the GRIT Lab (Green Roof Innovation Testing Laboratory) at the Daniels Faculty.

Established in 2010 by the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, the GRIT Lab is a 2,000-square-foot state-of-the-art facility that includes 33 green roof test beds, a weather station, and 264 sensors connected to over 5,000 linear feet of wiring. Data on soil moisture, runoff, temperature, rainfall, humidity, solar, and wind is collected every two seconds. The lab sits atop of the Daniels Faculty building at 230 College, and is the only one of its kind testing green roofs in an urban environment in Canada.

"We're hoping this work will potentially influence or augment the green roof standard and green roof monitoring in the City of Toronto, and that it might also affect what industry is actually producing and promoting," Assistant Professor Liat Margolis tells Yonge Street writer Katia Snukal.

Read the full article on Yonge Street's website.

Living The High Life

New York greened an old rail line. Could a similar project succeed in Toronto?

Vanessa Farquharson, National Post

Published: 8/15/2009 12:00:00 AM

The train track hovering 30 feet in the air above New York City, known as the High Line, was originally designed to carry freight traffic; but in 1980, after a thriving trucking industry reduced the need for rail service, it carried its last shipment -- three car loads of frozen turkeys.

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